I. Field of the Invention
The present invention generally relates to computerized planning systems and methods and to such systems and methods for planning demand for products. More particularly, the invention relates to planning systems and methods for planning demand for a configurable product in a managed supply chain.
II. Background Information
Demand planning is used to forecast the demand for products, such as configurable products. A configurable product is a product having one or more product dependent characteristics. Demand planning works with characteristics-based forecasting. For example, a configurable products such as a car has certain attributes (also referred to as product dependent characteristics) such as color, model and engine. Conventional demand planning identifies certain primary attributes, such as model, and other secondary attributes, which are typically less important, such as battery type.
In the conventional demand planning, in order to reduce the volume of data to be processed in demand planning, only the possible combinations of primary attributes are stored independently. One problem with this approach to demand planning is that planned characteristics can only be used for planning configurable products, and not for configured finished products and assemblies. Another problem with conventional demand planning is that it is not possible to generate configured orders (e.g., CDP and IBASE orders) for the explosion of the Production Process Model (PPM) and Integrated Product and Process Engineering (iPPE). An additional problem with conventional demand planning is that configured sales orders do not take into account configured forecasts.
In view of the foregoing, it is an object of the present invention to address these and other problems encountered in conventional demand planning systems and methods.